Stubborn Violence Shadows Buildup to Falluja Invasion

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 3 - In the latest attack on Iraq's oil industry, gunmen killed a senior Oil Ministry official as he was commuting to work on Wednesday morning, a ministry spokesman said.

The shooting came on a day punctuated by violence, as Iraqis and American soldiers followed the results of the American presidential election and braced for an expected invasion of the insurgent bastion in Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad.

In other incidents on Wednesday, a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint near Baghdad International Airport, killing a British security contractor and injuring at least nine Iraqis, Western security advisers and hospital officials said.

In the north, at Salman Pak, a roadside bomb hit an American military patrol, killing one soldier and wounding another, military officials said.

Insurgents also sent a video to Al Jazeera, the Arab-language satellite news station, showing three Iraqi National Guardsmen being beheaded, and posted another on the Internet of the decapitation of an Iraqi Army officer.

Late Tuesday, a Lebanese-American man was kidnapped from his home in an affluent neighborhood in Baghdad.

With Senator John Kerry's concession to President Bush, many people here predicted that it was only a matter of days before Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and the American military would order an all-out assault on Falluja, a city of 300,000, in an effort to break the back of the insurgency, even though the prime minister says he is trying to hold talks with the city's leaders. American warplanes were reported to have struck at targets in the northeastern and southern parts of Falluja.

The killing of the Oil Ministry official, Hussein Ali al-Fatal, took place as he was leaving his home in the Yarmouk neighborhood in western Baghdad to go to the ministry, said Asim Jihad, a ministry spokesman. Mr. Fatal was the head of the Oil Product Distribution Company, a state-run enterprise.

His death came one day after insurgents sabotaged a northern pipeline that exports crude oil from the Kirkuk area to Ceyhan, a port in Turkey. The explosion forced a shutdown of the pipeline. Since September, the ministry has been trying to pump 200,000 to 400,000 barrels of crude oil a day through the pipeline, which is the target of frequent sabotage, said Walid Khadduri, an Iraqi oil analyst based in Cyprus.

Mr. Jihad said that the pipeline fire had been put out and that it would take three to four days to repair the damaged area. An official with the North Oil Company, based in Kirkuk, told Agence France-Presse that repairs would probably take 10 days.

The market price of crude oil has risen past $50 a barrel, and Iraqi and American officials are relying on exports to help revive the country's stagnant economy. The northern pipeline accounts for, at best, just under one-fifth of current exports. Saboteurs have also staged attacks on southern pipelines near the oil fields in Basra.

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Early Wednesday, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, one of the most militant groups in Iraq, posted an video on the Internet showing the beheading of an Iraqi Army officer named Maj. Hussein Shanoon. The group said it had captured Major Shanoon near Mosul, a northern city that is quickly tumbling into chaos. "With God's will, this will be the fate of anyone who thinks of supporting the occupying Crusader troops," the group said in a separate Internet message.

Later, a group calling itself the Brigades of the Iraqi Honorables sent a video to Al Jazeera that showed militants beheading three Iraqi National Guardsmen accused of spying for the American forces, the television network reported.

An Interior Ministry official said gunmen stormed a home in the upscale neighborhood of Mansour, in western Baghdad, late Tuesday and abducted Radim Sadiq, a Lebanese-American who was working here. The United States Embassy did not immediately confirm the abduction, and it was unclear how Mr. Sadiq was employed.

It was the second abduction in the neighborhood this week. On Monday, an American who has yet to be identified was seized with five other men, including a Nepali, a Filipino and three Iraqi guards. Two of the guards were released on Tuesday.

In September, gunmen raided another home in Mansour and captured two American engineers and a Briton. Those three men soon surfaced in a video from the militant group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The group beheaded all three men after American officials refused to meet the group's demands.

More than 160 foreigners have been kidnapped so far this year in Iraq. Last Saturday, the body of a Japanese backpacker who had been abducted and decapitated was found in Baghdad. On Wednesday, Japanese officials denied a statement by his captors, members of a group called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, that the Japanese government had offered "millions of dollars" for his release.

The suicide car bomb at the Baghdad airport checkpoint exploded around 8:30 a.m., as a long line of cars was waiting to enter the airport, witnesses said. An Iraqi Airways employee, Wisam Muhammad, said he saw a sport utility vehicle try to speed up around the line of cars and ram into a group of American soldiers and Iraqi security officers at the checkpoint. Another witness, a man with a blood-streaked face in Yarmouk Hospital, said the driver was bearded and wearing traditional gray robes and a skullcap.

A former member of the British Royal Marines who was working as a guard at the checkpoint was killed in the blast, said two Western security advisers in Baghdad who knew the man. Hospital officials said at least nine Iraqis were wounded. The American military said it had suffered no casualties.

In preparation for the country's first democratic elections, scheduled for January, Iraqis arriving to collect their November rations at several food centers in Baghdad were handed voter registration forms. The Iraqi electoral commission began distributing the sheets on Monday and will continue doing so through sometime next month.

"I hope the election process will be conducted safely and in a guaranteed way," Abdul Zahra Muhammad, 71, said as he collected his rations and voter sheets at a center in Mansour. "I'm worried about how people will go to the elections. I'm very worried about car bombs. And does the government have enough control over security to hold a successful election?"

Khalid al-Ansary and Layla Isitfan contributed reporting for this article.